The Courage of Doing Philosophy: Essays Presented to Leszek Nowak

472 Pages·2007·1.53 MB·English

by  Jerzy Brzezinski

The Courage of Doing Philosophy

The Courage of Doing Philosophy
Essays Presented to Leszek Nowak
edited by
Jerzy Brzeziński, Andrzej Klawiter,
Theo A.F. Kuipers, Krzysztof Łastowski,
Katarzyna Paprzycka & Piotr Przybysz
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of
“ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for
documents - Requirements for permanence”.
ISBN: 978-90-420-2336-9
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2007
Printed in The Netherlands
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Andrzej Klawiter, Krzysztof (cid:224)astowski — Introduction:
Originality, Courage, and Responsibility. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
List of Books by Leszek Nowak. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Selected Bibliography of Leszek Nowak’s Writings . . . . . . . . . . . 27
SCIENCE AND IDEALIZATION
Theo A. F. Kuipers — On Two Types of Idealization and
Concretization: The Case of Truth Approximation. . . . . . . . 75
Ilkka Niiniluoto — Idealization, Counterfactuals, and
Truthlikeness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
R. F. Hendry, Stathis Psillos — How to Do Things with
Theories: An Interactive View of Language and Models in
Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
Izabella Nowakowa — The Method of Ideal Types versus
the Method of Idealization. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
Igor Hanzel — Leszek Nowak on Scientific Laws and Scien-
tific Explanation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
Michael J. Shaffer — Idealization, Counterfactuals, and the
Correspondence Principle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
Krzysztof (cid:224)astowski — Synthetic and Neutralist Theory of
Evolution: The Issue of Methodological Correlations. . . . . . 205
Adolfo García de la Sienra — Idealization in the Labor
Theory of Value. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219
Krzysztof Brzechczyn — On the Application of the non-
Marxian Historical Materialism to the Development of
Non-European Societies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235
6 Contents

SCIENCE AND ONTOLOGY
C. Ulises Moulines — Model Construction, Idealization, and
Scientific Ontology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257
Thomas Mormann — Representations, Possible Worlds,
and the Idealizational Approach to Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273
Evandro Agazzi — Idealization, Intellectual Intuition, Inter-
pretation, and Ontology in Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303
Piotr Przybysz — What does to Be Mean in Leszek Nowak’s
Conception of Unitarian Metaphysics? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315
Roberto Poli — Formal and Ontological Roundabouts . . . . . . 325
Jan Wole(cid:276)ski — Metalogic and Ontology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 337
SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY AND VALUES
Max Urchs — On the Structure of Deceptive Speech Acts:
Lying as an Element of Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 355
Jerzy Perzanowski — In Praise of Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . 375
Roman Kubicki — Love: In the Search for the First Philoso-
phy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 395
Bert Hamminga — Is the Enlightened Worldview on Re-
treat?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 415
Martti Kuokkanen — Boxing and Violence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 445
Katarzyna Paprzycka — On Willfully Contrarious Beliefs. . . 461
INTRODUCTION:
ORIGINALITY, COURAGE, AND RESPONSIBILITY

Leszek Nowak’s Ways of Doing Philosophy
This introduction makes no claim to neutrality. We have no desire to
write about Leszek simply as a thinker, teacher and man of upright
character. We leave that task to someone else, to someone who can
keep some distance from their subject. We feel as if we were his
spiritual children and we find ourselves unable to stop enumerating
his merits and accomplishments. We had the fortune to experience
something incredible and unique: we met a master who was not only
willing to teach us, work with us and become our true friend, but
who, through each of his texts or seminars, filled us with admiration
and sheepish embarrassment. Admiration because, after over thirty
years of acquaintance, we are still unable to predict his next move.
Although illness has prevented him from giving lectures and hosting
seminars, he still manages to work just as hard as ever, and we,
waiting for his next text, wonder what stifling habit of thought Leszek
will boisterously grapple with this time, and whether he will once
again come up with the kind of thought that just does not become
respectable professors — those custodians of timeworn traditions and
In: J. Brzezi(cid:276)ski, A. Klawiter, T.A.F. Kuipers, K. (cid:224)astowski, K. Paprzycka, P. Przybysz
(eds.), The Courage of Doing Philosophy: Essays Dedicated to Leszek Nowak, pp. 7-21.
Amsterdam/New York, NY: Rodopi, 2007.
8 Andrzej Klawiter and Krzysztof (cid:224)astowski
guardians of philosophical mantras. In this respect Leszek is the
youngest among us. Unfortunately, this source of admiration is also a
cause of embarrassment. What is an eager student to do when their
master continually demonstrates, with such ease and grace, ever new
and increasingly complicated figures of thought, and they — a mere
apprentice to the trade — have yet to fully master the figures from the
first lessons? Our frustration was made worse by the fact that Leszek
refused to treat us as assistants who filled in the gaps and smoothed
down any rough edges in the system created by the boss. He expected
us to be as bursting with thought as he was. Presenting a new text at
a seminar every week was like water off a duck’s back for him. For us,
his doctoral students, with whom he had regular tutorials, this was
an ordeal of fire. Once a week, at a specified time, we had to arrive at
Leszek’s house with a new idea (as well as something he took for
granted — our work on the task set the previous week). Time and time
again each of us would come to him full of remorse, explaining that,
unfortunately, that week we had not managed to meet our quotas
because no new ideas whatsoever had come into our heads. Then
Leszek would comfort the wrongdoer, sit them down in an armchair
and steer the conversation in such a way that, as it unfolded, it
became clear that the many days of wracking our brains for an
interesting idea had not been in vain, not by any means. The
delighted doctoral student would discover that the idea had been on
its way all the time, that it was their own little brainchild, and Leszek
only gave his expert help in bringing it out into the world.
Leszek Nowak is such a multifaceted and productive person that it
is impossible to provide an exhaustive account of his achievements to
date. So we shall focus instead upon what makes him, in our opinion,
one of the most original thinkers in Polish philosophy after the Second
World War. We will present the main strands of his academic work
and draw attention to some of the other fields he has been active in.
Concentrating on the essentials, we will begin by looking at the most
important — his research activity. We shall also discuss Leszek’s
accomplishments as a publisher (the creator and editor-in-chief of
Pozna(cid:276) Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities,
the first philosophy book series after the World War II that was led by
Originality, Courage, and Responsibility 9
a Polish scholar and which promoted Polish philosophy among an
English speaking audience), his role as organizer of academic life and
teacher of young philosophers. To round off, we outline his political
activities and his work as an essayist and political commentator.
Biographical Note
Leszek Nowak was born on the 7th of January 1943, in the town of
Wi(cid:266)ckowice, which can be found in the region of Ma(cid:225)opolska, in the
south of Poland. He studied law at Adam Mickiewicz University (1961-
1965), and then philosophy at Warsaw University (1966). From his
student days to the present, he has been connected with Adam Mickie-
wicz University in Pozna(cid:276), first in the Department of Law, and later in
the Institute of Philosophy. He took part in the seminars of Czes(cid:225)aw
Znamierowski, Zygmunt Ziembi(cid:276)ski and Jerzy Giedymin. He wrote his
doctoral thesis on the theory of law, entitled Problems of the Meaning
and Validity of Legal Norms and the Semiotic Function of Language,
under the supervision of Professor Zygmunt Ziembi(cid:276)ski, in 1967. He
gained his habilitation in general methodology in 1970, on the basis of
the work The Methodological Foundations of Karl Marx’s Capital. He
became a professor without chair in 1976 and a professor with chair in
1990.
In 1985, Professor Nowak was expelled from the university for his
involvement with underground publishing (the Minister Science of
Higher Education who signed the decision had previously been the
rector at Adam Mickiewicz University, so he effectively fired a former
colleague). In 1989, he was invited back to work and took up his former
position again. He has been a correspondent member of the Polish
Academy of Sciences since 1994.
Leszek Nowak was also: Visiting-professor in several Western
universities, a fellow of the Institute of Advanced Research in
Wassenaar and Berlin; the founder (in 1975) and editor-in-chief of the
international book series Pozna(cid:276) Studies in the Philosophy of the
Sciences and the Humanities (Amsterdam: Rodopi; 92 volumes had
been published by the end of 2006 ) as well as the series, published in